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CSIRO blocks for Rudd and AGW
CSIRO came out in the last week with a scare campaign about the price of oil that was gleefully repeated over and over in the news media.

PETROL could hit $8 a litre within a decade as oil production begins to dwindle and demand continues to soar, a CSIRO study to be released today says.

The study, Fuel For Thought, warns this would add up to $220 a week to the cost of running a medium-sized passenger vehicle by 2018, resulting in severe social and economic consequences.

Their solution? The already fatal idea of biofuels, currently causing massive food shortages in a country near you. (Although CSIRO want to use biofuels that don't reduce food production....a self-refuting notion)

But what really struck me was how this report was really just running interference for Kevin Rudd and the global warming delusion crowd.

As almost every news article talked about (ergo the comment was in the CSIRO press release), how Kevin Rudd's emission trading scheme (ETS) would add 10 to 25 cents to the cost of fuel.

See...the ETS isn't really that bad (comparing a $6.50 rise to a mere 10 to 25 cents)....Clearly, the CSIRO wants everyone to get behind the delusionists ETS.

The problem is, CSIRO is relying on peak oil rubbish, which is claiming the world is going to run out of oil. It was rubbish back in 1956 when it first came about, and it is rubbish now.

The reason peak oil is rubbish, is that there are many many more sources of oil that are untapped.

As this graph (HT: Powerline) from the Institute of Energy Research shows, the US alone has vastly more shale oil reserves than the normal oil reserves available today. Only a few years ago, it was thought that shale oil could be retrieved at a cost of $40 a barrel. Compared with todays prices of $140 a barrel, this is economically viable and would actually reduce petrol prices.

The real problem is that for years, environmentalists have pressured the U.S. into not developing ANY of it's undeveloped oil reserves, shale oil or not.

The upshot is that the CSIRO is using dodgey science (unsurprising for global warming delusionists) in order to block for Kevin Rudd, so that his ETS is not seen as a large cost to consumers.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Sunday, July 13, 2008